There's a memorable passage in Tom Wolfe's hyperactive self-advertisement of 1973, The New Journalism, where he describes 60s New York as "a hulking carnival… pandemonium with a big grin on". Wolfe's competitive writer's fear was that "some enterprising novelist was going to come along and do this whole wondrous scene with one gigantic daring bold stroke. It was so ready, so ripe – beckoning... but it never happened." Instead, the man in the white suit stepped into the breach himself to create "the non-fiction novel". Wolfe and the New Journalists plugged American prose into the mains, giving it an intravenous shot of a dangerously addictive treatment.

Ben Fountain is a former Texas lawyer who caused a mild sensation in 2006 with a collection of stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: great reviews, comparisons with Graham Greene and John le Carré, and the accolade of a Malcolm Gladwell study of "late bloomers" in the New Yorker. He's now in his mid-50s and this is his first published novel.

So what's it about? The short answer is Iraq. Billy Lynn is a member of Bravo Company, one of eight US servicemen who emerge unscathed from a firefight to be brought home by the Bush administration for a victory lap. The climax of this promotional tour, and the meat of this novel, is their appearance at the Dallas Cowboys stadium as part of the halftime show on a Thanksgiving afternoon. By bringing the war back home, Fountain has come up with a clever and imaginative take on the classic American combat novel. He's done it with the kind of ambition that sent shivers down the spine of the young Tom Wolfe. Fountain is a child of the Wolfe generation.

Age and achievement are as likely to go well together as to be at odds. Daniel Defoe wrote his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, at 58. But Ben Fountain's age only becomes an issue because – beyond question – he has drunk deeply at the heady well of Wolfean Kool-Aid. Here, for instance, is Billy at home with his family in "the three-bedroom, two-bath brick ranch house on Cisco Street with sturdy access ramps front and back for his father's wheelchair, a dark burgundy motorised job with fat whitewalls and an American flag decal stuck to the back." Whoah! as Wolfe might say.

As telling as Fountain's over-revved, high-octane style, with its "nina leven" and "DeeeterrRRRminaaaAAAtion", is the "non-fiction novel" point-of-view. Is this Billy Lynn's interior monologue, or Fountain's? Where does one cease and the other begin ? This is not a novel told from the inside out but a made-for-TV war story narrated from the outside in. Fountain describes Billy's recollection of the company's famous firefight: "All your soldier life you dream of such a moment and every Joe with a weapon got a piece of it, a perfect storm of massing fire and how those beebs blew apart, sights not to be believed and never forgotten..." The unintended consequence of Fountain's bravura performance is to reduce the experience to words and style. It is, as advertised, extraordinary writing, but essentially fiction for non-fiction readers.